DDR4 is starting to arrive at NewEgg and some kits are actually in stock for those who want to be the first on their block to have these new DIMMs and can remortgage their home. The price of Haswell-E CPUs and motherboards is as of yet unknown but looking over the past few years of Intel's new processors you can assume the flagship processor will be around $999.99 with the feature rich motherboards starting around $200 and quickly raising from there.

Both G.SKILL and Crucial have lead with 32GB kits in DDR4-2133 and DDR4-2400 and as you can see the price for their DIMMs and most likely the competitions will be between $450 to $500.

At the 16GB mark you have more choices with Corsair joining in and a range of speeds that go up to DDR4-2800 as well as your choice of a pair of 8GB DIMMs or four 4GB DIMMs. Corsair was kind enough to list the timings, the DDR4-2666 @ 15-17-17-35 and the DDR4-2800 @ 16-18-18-36 though you will certainly pay a price for the RAM with the highest frequencies.

Intel product releases are always dearly priced, the introduction of a new generation of RAM is both exciting and daunting. You will see power reductions, base frequencies that were uncommon in DDR3 and very likely an increase in the ability to overclock these DIMMs but it is going to cost you. If Haswell-E is in your sights you should start planning on how to afford replacing your CPU, motherboard and RAM at the same time as this is no refresh this is a whole new product line.

Vengeance LPX memory is a new Corsair memory line designed for high-performance overclocking with a low-profile heatspreader is made of pure aluminum for faster heat dissipation and the eight-layer PCB helps manage heat and provides superior overclocking headroom. The memory kits are available in black, red, white, or blue so that enthusiasts, gamers, and modders can add a touch style to match the color scheme of their PC.

About DDR4
DDR4 is faster. Even at the baseline speed of DDR4 delivers twice the bandwidth with 2133 MT/s (million transfers per second) compared with the base DDR3 1600 MT/s. With optimizations games and applications have the potential to load faster and run more smoothly.

DDR4 uses a lot less power and runs cooler.
With each new generation of CPU and GPU architecture, system power consumption and heat generation become more and more important. DDR4 modules operate at an ultra-low standard 1.2 volts compared to the 1.5 and 1.65 volts of DDR3 memory, allowing DDR4 memory to consume significantly less power and generate less heat.

DDR4 memory modules can get bigger.
DDR3 is limited to 8GB modules for a maximum of 32GB on standard four-socket motherboards. DDR4 will have the ability to enable 16GB per module by 2015. A motherboard with eight memory slots will be upgradeable to an amazing 128GB or DDR4 memory.

Pricing, Availability, and Warranty
Corsair Vengeance LPX Series and Dominator Platinum DDR4 memory kits will be available at the end of August from Corsair's worldwide network of authorized distributors and resellers. The Vengeance LPX and Dominator Platinum memory kits are supplied with a limited lifetime warranty and are backed up by Corsair's customer service and technical support.

Currently available for a mere $870 the 8GB DDR3-3100 dual channel kit from ADATA with timings of 12-14-14-36 has to be among the most expensive consumer RAM available on the market. We can only hope that DDR4 does not arrive at a similar speed and price point but instead with slower clocked DIMMs at a more reasonable price and with improvements to performance. Legit Reviews' testing showed that these DIMMs offer almost no benefit over DDR3-1600 with tighter timings in real usage but you can get higher scores on synthetic benchmarks. If benchmarking better than the competition and swap-able heatspreaders with different colours is attractive to you then you could pick up these DIMMs, otherwise you really won't be getting value for your money.

"Gone are the days of being on the cutting edge of memory with DDR3 running at 2133MHz! These days running 2133MHz memory is pretty much considered the norm for a high end gaming rig. If you’re looking to be on the bleeding edge of memory speeds you’re going to be limited to only one or two kits. Today we have one of the fastest kits available on the market to put through the paces, the ADATA XPG V3 DDR3 3100MHz 8GB memory kit. Read on to see if this big dollar kit is worth nearly a thousand dollars."

About a week ago, HWBOT posted a video of a new DDR3 memory clock record which was apparently beaten the very next day after the movie was published. Tom's Hardware reported on the first of the two, allegedly performed by Gigabyte on their Z97X-SOC Force LN2 Motherboard. The Tom's Hardware article also, erroneously, lists the 2nd place overclock (then 1st place) at 4.56 GHz when it was really half that, because DDR is duplex (2.28 GHz). This team posted their video with a recording of the overclock being measured by an oscilloscope. This asserts that they did not mess with HWBOT.

The now first place team, which managed 2.31 GHz on the same motherboard, did not go to the same level of proof, as far as I can tell.

This is the 2nd fastest overclock...

... but the fastest to be recorded with an oscilloscope that I can tell

Before the machine crashes to a blue screen, the oscilloscope actually reports 2.29 GHz. I am not sure why they took 10 MHZ off, but I expect it is because the system crashed before HWBOT was able to record that higher frequency. Either way, 2.28 GHz was a new world record, and verified by a video, whether or not it was immediately beat.

Tom's Hardware also claims that liquid nitrogen was used to cool the system, which brings sense to why they would use an LN2 board. It could have been chosen just for its overclocking features, but that would have been a weird tradeoff. The LN2 board doesn't have mounting points for a CPU air or water cooler. The extra features would have been offset by the need to build a custom CPU cooler, to not use liquid nitrogen with. It is also unclear how the memory was cooled, whether it was, somehow, liquid nitrogen-cooled too, or if it was exposed to the air.

X-bit Labs did testing of a variety of memory speeds on Haswell to determine if there is a point of diminishing returns at which point your well earned money is no longer bringing you better performance. By setting up tests of two different DIMMs at set speeds, in this case DDR3-1600 and DDR3-1866 and varying the CAS Latency they tested to see if higher speeds or lower latency gave the best performance. Using both synthetic benchmarks as well as gaming tests they determined that frequency is the key to better performance which makes sense considering the theoretical top frequency of 2933 MHz. Check out all the benchmarks in their full review.

"The development of the new processor microarchitectures goes on and frequencies of contemporary types of DDR3 SDRAM grow as well. Is there any sense in using high-speed memory with modern Haswell processors? To answer this question, we have analyzed DDR3 frequency and timings influence on LGA 1150 platform performance."

Kingston, known primarily for RAM, flash drives, and SSDs, discussed the health of their company. VR-Zone reported on the interview and highlighted the company's sentiments about the PC industry. Long story short, Kingston sees growth in sales of PC gaming hardware -- apparently 20% year-over-year. The company expects that this growth comes primarily from SSD upgrades, either from rotating media or, they claim, replacing years-old, entry-level SSDs with more modern (probably in both speed and size) options.

Nathan Su, APAC (Asia-Pacific) director of Kingston, believes that "many users" have experienced low-tier SSDs and, it seems, would be willing to invest in the full thing. He does not clarify what he means, whether he is talking about SSD caching, or just a really small (or slow) SSDs from drive generations past.

There is a bit of a concern that SSD prices will continue to fall, with some drives reaching under 40c/GB in recent sales. As a consumer, I (selfishly) hope that prices continue to drop, while still remaining profitably sustainable for the manufacturers. Hopefully Kingston is accounting for this and will continue to see growth at the same time.

ADATA has been showing off some upcoming products at Computex, and it's all about DRAM.

We'll begin with an upcoming line of PCIe Enterprise/Server SSDs powered by the SandForce SF3700-series controller. We've been waiting for products with the SF3700 controller since January, when ADATA showed a prototype board at CES, and ADATA is now showcasing the controller in the "SR1020" series drives.

The first is a 2TB 2.5" drive, but the interface was not announced (and the sample on the floor appeared to be an empty shell). The listed specs are performance up to 1800MB/s and 150K IOPS, with the drive powered by the SF-3739 controller. Support for both AHCI and NVMe is also listed, along with the usual TRIM, NCQ, and SMART support.

Another 2TB SSD was shown with exactly the same specs as the 2.5" version, but this one is built on the M.2 spec. The drive will connect via 4 lanes of Gen 2 PCI Express. Both drives in ADATA's SR1020 PCIe SSD lineup will be available in capacities from 240GB - 2TB, and retail pricing and availability is forthcoming.

Continuing the DRAM theme, ADATA also showed new DDR4 modules in commodity and enthusiast flavors. Both of the registered DIMMs on display (an ultra-low profile DIMM was also shown) had standard DDR4 specs of 2133MHz at 1.2V, but ADATA also showed some performance DDR4 at their booth.

Ultra-Speed RAM, APU-Style

In our review of the Kingston HyperX Predator 2666MHz kit, we discovered what those knowledgeable about Intel memory scaling already knew: for most applications, and specifically games, there is no significant advantage to increases in memory speed past the current 1600MHz DDR3 standard. But this was only half of the story. What about memory scaling with an AMD processor, and specifically an APU? To find out, we put AMD’s top APU, the A10-7850K, to the test!

Ready for some APU memory testing!

The APU

AMD has created a compelling option with their APU lineup, and the inclusion of powerful integrated graphics allows for interesting build options with lower power and space requirements, and even make building tiny mini-ITX systems for gaming realistic. It’s this graphical prowess compared to any other onboard solution that creates an interesting value proposition for any gamer looking at a new low-cost build. The newest Kaveri APU’s are getting a lot of attention and they beg the question, is a discrete graphics card really needed for gaming at reasonable settings?

If you were impressed by the low wattage required to run the AMD AM1 Athlon 5350 and are thinking of building a low power system along the lines of the one Josh used in his review Kingston has a product to help you lower that total system voltage a little more. HyperX Genesis LoVo uses only a mere 1.35V to power the 16GB DDR3-1600 CL9 kit and their low profile helps if you are building a small sized system. Performance at stock speeds is quite decent, with the possibility of overclocking to add more speed if you desire but these DIMMs are more about power savings than raw power. Check out the full review at Funky Kit.

"Even though higher clocked RAM is great for overclocking and gaming for most computer users, memory at lower clocks is good enough for the general tasks they perform daily. For those users, memory speed is usually less important than capacity so today we wish to present something more regular in the memory's world what is Kingston HyperX Genesis LoVo 16GB DDR3-1600 CL9. As probably some readers already noticed, we can't really call it regular memory as Kingston specified it to run at low voltage of 1.35V ... and it's green like most eco-friendly products."

SK Hynix, one of the leading producers of RAM modules, announced a single stick of DDR4 with 128GB capacity. While this is intended for the server room, I hope that we will see workstation components attempt to be compatible in the near future. It is difficult to find a board that can support more than 64GB at all, let alone twice that, per stick.

As for the typical desktop users? Let's face it, this is overkill, eight times over, generously, per stick. Web browsers are beginning to ring up the memory usage as more and more tabs are loaded simultaneously but, otherwise, there is little use for it for them.

But for those of us who are not them, this could be awesome. It is still unclear how much memory a Haswell-EX motherboard, running on an Intel X99 chipset, will support. I can assume that this stick will not be compatible... but we can always hope, right?